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Lucas stared into the darkness. ‘Your faith in me is touching but misplaced. I was a lousy father, Emma.’
‘That isn’t true. And I should know because I had one. Or rather, I didn’t have one. The man who fathered me wasn’t interested in that role. He walked out after my sister was born. He came back soon after and my mother once told me that the reason she had me was to try and bring them closer together. How she could ever have thought a man who had never wanted one child would have been suddenly happy to have a second, I have no idea. He walked out for the final time while Mum was in the hospital with me. I’ve never even met him.’
Suddenly he understood more clearly why she would have avoided relationships. She had no reason to trust men. And she shouldn’t be trusting him. Knowing that this was going to end badly, he tightened his grip on her. ‘That must have been tough.’
‘It was, but tougher for my mum and my sister. My sister especially because she always felt that for him to walk out there must have been something lacking in her. Which was wrong, of course. There was something lacking in him, but that isn’t true of you so don’t ever tell me again that you were a bad father.’
‘I didn’t leave, but I might as well have done.’ And suddenly, wrapped in her warmth, the words that had been jammed inside him for years flowed. ‘It was snowing. Exactly like the other night. I’d been working long hours, trying to juggle several big projects. Because I often worked late and Elizabeth would be asleep by the time I arrived home, I was the one who got her up in the morning. We had breakfast together. That was our time together and it was always just the two of us because Vicky never emerged before eleven. That morning we had breakfast as usual. Nothing was different. You have no idea how many times I have gone over and over it in my mind, trying to work out if I missed something, but I don’t remember anything out of the ordinary. I made her toast. And I cut her toast into the shape of a house because I always did that.’
‘She must have loved that.’
‘She did. She always ate the chimney first. I kissed her goodbye and promised her I’d take her to the park in the morning. Then I dropped her at school.’ Remembering it was agonizing, the desire to put the clock back and do things differently almost overpowering. ‘I left a note for Vicky telling her I’d be home before she had to leave for the party.’
‘You weren’t going to the party with her?’
‘I wasn’t interested in spending an evening at a party where I knew no one. I wanted to be with my daughter. I was planning to leave the office at five to give me plenty of time to get home. Just before I left I had a phone call from Elizabeth’s teacher, wondering how she was. Apparently she’d started feeling ill at school and they’d rung Vicky.’ He paused to breathe. ‘When I rang Vicky and asked her what the doctor had said she told me she hadn’t been able to get an appointment so she’d just put Elizabeth to bed and let her sleep. At that point I knew. Don’t ask me how, but I just knew it was serious. All I wanted to do was get home but the snow had made the roads almost impassable. Just like the other night.’
‘It must have been terrible for you. I can imagine how helpless you must have felt.’
‘I cannot tell you how bad that journey was, crawling through the snow, knowing that my daughter was sick. I rang Vicky again to tell her to take her to the Emergency Department but she told me I was overreacting and anyway she was just leaving for the party. We had a row. I told her she couldn’t leave and she told me that if I’d been home on time it wouldn’t have been an issue. She could have arrived at the party any time, but she wasn’t going to let something as insignificant as a sick child ruin her social life.’ The bitterness still flowed but it was weaker now, diluted by time. ‘She left Elizabeth alone with an inexperienced babysitter. Call it instinct, but I called an ambulance and it arrived at the same time as I did. The moment I walked through the door I knew how sick she was. She was screaming. The screaming was terrible—’ He stopped because thinking about it was just too painful. ‘I saw that she had a rash. The paramedics were wonderful and they gave her antibiotics but it was too little too late. It was meningitis. The very worst type, with complications, and she went downhill so quickly it was shocking.’
‘That’s terrible. Truly awful.’ Her arms tightened around him. ‘But I don’t see how, even in your darkest moments, you could blame yourself for any of that.’
‘You want me to list the ways?’ There were so many. ‘If I hadn’t gone to work that morning, if I’d chosen to take her to the doctor instead of leaving it to Vicky, if I’d left work earlier—she’d still be alive.’
